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Genetically Engineered Big-brained Mice
StefanJ writes "'Are you pondering what I'm pondering Pinky?' An item on MSNBC reports that researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have produced mice with big, convoluted brains by inserting an single extra gene. I am reminded of two pieces of SF: Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius, about a lab experiment that produces a brainy dog, and Bruce Sterling "Our Neural Chernobyl," in which the country is overrun with cunning coyotes and tribes of raccoons."
They said that the mice were "Killed soon after birth"... what they didn't say is that they were killed after leading a bloody rebellion that culminated in a tense showdown in the lab, with one of the engineered mice holding a poisoned needle to one of the researcher's throats.
Luckily they were able to calm down the miscreant with a piece of cheese, and lured him far enough away from the researcher to turn him into a bloody splot on the (otherwise spotlessly clean linolium) floor.
Back to you Bob.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
That's what's so frustrating about medical imaging technology. It's advanced enough to show what the brain looks like in the skull while the organism is still living, but you don't have a real good way of looking at the very fine structure without dissecting the brain. But, the things that's important to these researchers is what's happening at the cellular level. They want to know how the cells are qualitatively and quantitaively different. For that kind of analysis, they need cells, and a whole lot of 'em to get batches of cell stuff they can measure. My wife does this kind of work and it's amazing what they have to do in order to measure some of these chemicals and cell components.
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
..."
..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."
...
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sit coms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."
Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.
"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioural research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run around mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behaviour we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own
Arthur's voice tailed off.
"Such subtlety
"What?" said Arthur.
"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis, - if it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous."
He paused for effect.
"You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme
"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."
"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems."
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Because imaging can't tell you things like:
Is the beta-catenin really being overexpressed ?
By how much?
In which neurons?
Has the expression of other proteins been altered too?
To answer these kinds of questions, you need to stain thin slices of the brains or grind up the brains.
-margaret